Nowhere: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  Immune to the abuse, the old man limped to the head of the table, pulled out the stately chair there, and said, “You just sit down and have your ice cream, young man, and no more nonsense.”

  I was amazed to see the prince promptly do as told, though he was still muttering peevishly.

  He said to me, “I suppose you wonder why I tolerate the insolence of this wretched old thing, but he’s been my personal retainer since childhood. There’s no one else I can trust, you see.”

  I had not been told where to sit, and not wanting to call attention to myself—it’s strange how the presence of royalty makes bad taste of what would otherwise be routine—I shyly slid out the chair on Sebastian’s right and sat down.

  The prince picked up a large soup spoon and began to bang it on the tabletop. This sort of infantile demonstration was familiar to me from visits to my married sister, whose daughter, my niece, was an unusually disagreeable baby as well as one of the ugliest children I had ever seen, a dead ringer for my jawless, flap-eared brother-in-law.

  “Ice cream!” Sebastian was shouting. “I want my ice cream.” These complaints went on for some time, no doubt because Rupert moved so slowly. But at last the old retainer wheeled up to the table a trolley on which, embedded in a tank full of crushed ice, was what would appear to be a canister of vanilla ice cream of the capacity of several gallons. Amidst the chains with which he was hung, Rupert found a golden spoon. He plunged this implement into the container and carefully gathered some ice cream within its bowl. He brought the spoon up but did not taste its contents before inhaling the aroma with quivering nostrils. At last he took the spoon’s burden between his desiccated lips, chewed awhile, rheumy eyes rolling, and then brought up from behind him, in his left hand, a shallow silver vessel and, turning away from the prince, but towards me, deliberately spat out the melted residue of what he had been tasting. This was not a palate-piquing spectacle.

  The prince cackled maliciously. “I look forward to the day when someone has poisoned it, you ancient swine, and you fall to the floor and die, foaming at the mouth and writhing in agony.”

  Rupert’s dried-apple countenance stayed noncommittal as, using two spoons, he built, within a capacious golden bowl, a Himalayan peak of ice cream. Sebastian watched the project with every appearance of mesmerization. When the mountain had at last been sculptured to Rupert’s taste, the old man lifted a gold sauceboat high as his shoulder and poured from it a stream of butterscotch syrup onto the summit of the vanilla Everest. From other golden vessels he took, in turn, whipped cream, crushed nuts, chocolate sprinkles, those edible little silver beads, and finally a garishly red maraschino cherry.

  When Sebastian saw that the dish had been completed, his importunate cries became more shrill, and when the old retainer at last delivered it to him he fell upon it with a ferocity for which the word “attacked” would be a euphemism. So swift was his work that for an instant I believed he was using no tool but rather shoveling it in with both bare fists. But after my eye adjusted to the motion I could identify, along with the spoon in his right hand, a fork in his left, and though he ate so rapidly, he employed these instruments with the deftness of a surgeon.

  No sooner had the last spoonful gone from bowl to prince than a lackey whisked away the former and old Rupert supplied his sovereign with a napkin the size of a beach towel. Sebastian made vigorous use of this linen sheet, but in point of fact I saw not the least besmirchment of his mouth after the furious bout with the elaborately garnished ice cream.

  For a few moments after the withdrawal of the empty bowl Sebastian sat with closed eyes, his expression one of momentarily weary sweet sadness, suggesting the well-known postcoital effect, but then his eyes sprang open and he looked at me for the first time since I had sat down.

  “It is probably not easy to accept the display you’ve just seen as not gluttony but a heroic effort to allay it.”

  “Indeed.”

  “By eating a sweet course as opener, one kills a good deal of the appetite for the rest of the meal,” said the prince, earnestly compressing his several chins against his upper chest. “It’s an American technique.”

  “Sounds like it,” I could not forbear saying: I really had lost some of my awe of him after witnessing the foregoing scene.

  “And the infantilism serves an emotional purpose,” he went on. “Being royal is to be deprived of the warmer human feelings. You may not be aware of it, Mr. Wren. It was not my mother the queen who gave me suck, but rather a peasant wetnurse whom I never knew, and I was reared by nannies and servants. In a word, that mound of ice cream topped with the preserved cherry might well represent the royal dug I was denied.”

  In America a grasp of basic Freudianism was now enjoyed by millhand and shopgirl: it was instructive for me to hear such platitudes from an absolute monarch.

  I offered, “Or perhaps that of the wetnurse?”

  Sebastian stared above my head. “No, the whipped cream and other embellishments would suggest a higher class.” He fluttered his long lashes: he really had very nice eyes. “In any event it’s a theory that derives from the studies of a certain professor who was not appreciated at the University of Vienna, but my great-grandfather saw the fellow’s possibilities and brought him here. Froelich?”

  “Or perhaps Freud, Your Royal Highness?”

  Sebastian shrugged. “Perhaps.”

  “He became quite well known.”

  “For this theory of the substitute tit?” The prince smiled. “Is it not extraordinary what frivolous enterprises will succeed in the world beyond Saint Sebastian? My great-grandfather’s interest in the professor was due to their common keenness for collecting classical antiquities and Jewish jokes.”

  At that moment Rupert rolled the trolley to the tableside, and I was pleasantly surprised to become aware that a footman was discreetly laying a place for me, with a plate bearing a gold relief of the crown, heavy gold cutlery, and a napkin of linen a good deal finer than any stuff I had worn against my skin: the serviette was embroidered with the crown, and the cutlery showed it in cameo.

  On Rupert’s trolley were several footed vessels the bowls of which were spanned by golden-brown domes of pastry. With a spoon from his dependent gear the old retainer broke through one of these and tasted whatever lay beneath, then put the bowl before Sebastian.

  The prince scowled at it. “You old sod, you have spoiled the looks of this dish, as well as the surprise.”

  “A pity,” said the imperturbable Rupert. “But I could hardly taste it without breaking the crust.”

  The prince seized a spoon and smashed the remainder of the pastry, churning the fragments into the contents of the bowl, which seemed to be a clear soup. He then dug into this mix with much the same urgency with which he had ingested the ice cream. He had emptied the first bowl by the time the lackey had placed mine before me, and before I penetrated the crust, Sebastian’s empty vessel had been removed and Rupert had served a second order.

  When I broke through the gossamer puff-pastry dome, I inhaled a celestial aroma which I could not have begun to identify until I saw, in the first spoonful of amber broth, black morsels of what could only be the priceless truffle, of which there were approximately as many pieces as there are noodles in a packet of my usual soup, Lipton Cup-a: I trust it is not bad taste to wonder what each of these bowls would have cost in New York.

  Sebastian drained four or five of them into his gullet, and we did not converse during this performance, which had no sooner ended than Rupert returned with a trolley load of the largest poached salmon I had ever seen and a sauce in which at least a pound of beluga caviar figured.

  It was during the fish course that I remembered that McCoy was not there. But it seemed impolitic to ask the prince about him, or indeed anything else, for with his last bite of the salmon, he turned eagerly to the new dish brought by Rupert, an enormous salver on which reposed dozens of tiny ortolans, which is to say birds the size of, uh, wrens: morally no differe
nt from cooked chickens, perhaps, or, speaking pantheistically, no more pitiable than a stringbean that has been boiled to death. Yet, this spectacle for me was fraught with pathos, and in fact I lost such little hunger as I had had.

  Sebastian however seemed only just to be hitting his gustatorial stride with the small birds, seizing each by its hairpin legs and plunging it beakfirst into his mouth, biting it off at, so to speak, the little knees and discarding the legs of one en route to the next: quite a pile of these limbs began to accumulate alongside his plate. Apparently he could deal internally with the bones and beaks.

  When a footman offered me a similar dish, I waved him off, but I did begin to sip the champagne I had been served by another.

  Perhaps it was the diminutive size of what he was eating that reminded Sebastian of his own childhood. In any event, after the second dozen of the ortolans, he suddenly stared at me with misted eyes and said, “Like the old heirs apparent to the French throne, I was most savagely treated as a child. I was whipped bloody by my tutors, viciously slapped and pinched by my nurses, and the detestable old jackal who stands behind me at this moment was crudest of the lot. My boyhood, Wren, was a living hell. It was intended to be, of course. That’s the only sort of thing that develops the ruthless, vengeful qualities of character so necessary to a ruler.”

  “But now, Your Royal Highness, you need answer to nobody,” said I.

  “How wrong you are! Commoners never understand these matters,” said the prince with a profound sigh. “I am in reality a helpless prisoner of tradition!” In a lugubrious manner he sucked two more little avian delicacies off their dead legs, but then quickly cheered up when more dishes arrived.

  No doubt it would be as exhausting to read more of this meal as it was to sit there throughout it sans appetite. I couldn’t have kept up with Sebastian at the most esurient moment of my hollow-bellied adolescence. I had no taste for the succession of dishes that arrived on the trolley, which never stayed long at rest: the game course (hare); the roast; the vegetables, which came in separate servings and included things like cardoons, salsify, baby artichokes no larger than plums; a profusion of salads; savories of cheese, mushrooms, bacon; and puddings and pastries and fresh fruits, each second or third course divided from the next by a palate-refreshing sherbet; and finally a great platterful of so-called friandises: bonbons, petit fours, candied chestnuts, and the like.

  The prince said no more, seeming indeed to forget me as well as all else, in the transports of what could only be called his orgy, though again, as with the initial ice cream, he dropped or dripped nothing from his implements and, so far as I could discern, had not even a sheen of grease on his lips, which were thin for such a plump face. He did, when in the so to speak thick of things, breathe rapidly and stertorously, and his eyes when not rolling were closed.

  How long this spectacle went on I cannot say, for though eating no more I continued to swallow champagne, my supply of which was ever replenished by my personal footman, but with little consequent peace of mind or, inexplicably, any reaction to the alcohol.

  But I was taken by surprise when Sebastian ate a final chocolate cream, lowered his chin and produced a shattering belch, then, raising himself slightly, whitening knuckles on the ends of the chair-arms, flatulated even more loudly.

  I tried to stick my nose into the champagne glass, but unfortunately it was of the narrow gauge called a flute. However, it might be of some interest here to note that the prince’s farts were, in my limited experience of them, not noisome: explain that if you can without embracing the assumption that his bowels were as regal as his blood.

  As the echoes of this report were still reverberating amongst the high vaultings overhead, Sebastian looked at me and said, “For some time now I have been bored with the affairs of state, from which a monarch cannot relieve himself short of abdicating. But I have no one to whom to turn over the crown. I am myself an only child. I have not yet married. By modern tradition the sovereign weds only a Sebastiani commoner. Until the late Renaissance we took wives or husbands from the other ruling families of Europe, but usually this meant that the consort was from a much larger and more powerful country than our little state, and too often it happened that the wedding was but a prelude to an attempt by the larger country to annex our land. We repelled all such, but at an awful price in Sebastiani lives. Sebastian the Eleventh was our Henry the Eighth, beheading as he did four queens in succession and all for the same crime: conspiring to betray their adopted country to the advantage of whichever German or Bohemian or Rumanian kingdom they came from.”

  The prince signaled to Rupert, and the old retainer brought him another glass of mineral water. He drank it down in one prolonged swallow, and then changed his position in the chair and farted again, this time producing a peculiar vibration that made the crystal glassware tremble.

  “I know I should marry some healthy peasant,” he resumed, “and impregnate her several times in succession, for my parents were irresponsible in producing only me—which is why I must take such precautions to ensure my safety: I am the last of the line. If I make no heir, this splendid little land will fall to the rabble.”

  Now, I am democratic to the marrow, and if I rail against the vile herd, or in any event that version of it all too oppressively evident in New York City, my objections have naught to do with matters of social class, my own being none too exalted. Yet, I confess that sitting at the prince’s table, and more important, drinking his champagne, I was inclined to take his problem as having much the same value as he himself put upon it.

  “Good heavens. Then you must by all means and with all haste find a bride, sir, for I have had my own personal experience with your enemies.” I began to tell him about the Liberation Front bombing, but royalty has (or anyway this example of it had) small patience with the narratives of commoners, and Sebastian spoke as if I had been sitting in silence.

  “Luckily,” I was saying, “I took seriously the voice on the phone, and ran from my building, for—”

  “The difficulty,” said Sebastian, “is that I cannot endure the prolonged company of women. Unfortunately, tradition demands that the prince go through an elaborate series of wedding ceremonies, and then make at least some pretense of sharing his life with the princess, insofar as official functions are concerned.”

  “Aha,” said I, in lieu of a better response. Obviously the prince was immune to charges of so-called sexism, which in New York were so easily brought by the kind of viragoes I dated, when my crime was so minor as to express a preference for a plain bagel as opposed to one of which honey, dates & nuts were constituents.

  “I’m afraid that artificial insemination is not possible, owing to the many restrictions precedent places on the royal semen,” said the prince. “The sovereign’s spunk is considered virtually sacred. The sheets are burned if I have a nocturnal emission in bed, for example.”

  I drank a half-fluteful of champagne.

  Sebastian was frowning into the middle distance. “I expect there’s nothing for it but to get cracking, repugnant as my life will be thereafter, until there are sufficient children to make extinction of the dynasty unlikely, and then the princess might be dispensed with.”

  I choked on a draught of champagne. “She will be put to death?”

  After a jolly laugh, Sebastian said, “No, that sort of thing has not been done in ever so long a time. It would now even be out of date to send her to a convent. No, she’ll have a pretty villa in the country and an adequate staff: perhaps not sumptuous accommodations, but neither will they be mean. My own mother enjoyed such lodgings for many years.”

  I was so relieved to hear that he would not, when done with her, execute the poor woman who married him that I could respond almost blithely to the plight of his maternal parent.

  “How nice.”

  “Rare indeed,” said the prince, “is the great man who has not found a boy’s flesh much sweeter than that of any female. Socrates, Caesar, Frederick the Great:
there are few exceptions, and those who pretended otherwise were surely hypocrites.”

  To make some expression of what in the Aesopian jargon of those groups who seek to promote the acceptance of their own special tastes was called “freedom of choice” would be truistic to the point of lèse majesté under the current conditions: the prince hardly required my permission to pollute the choirboys of the country he ruled absolutely, not to mention that he was not misguided in finding many celebrated sodomites on the rosters of prominent men. But it was ludicrous to suppose that the likes of Napoleon, Mark Twain, and General MacArthur, to take a disparate lot, had been fraudulently heterosexual. But remember that my purpose was not an inquiry into eroticism.

  I drew on my store of trivia: “And England’s Edward the Second and Ludwig the Mad of Bavaria.” The prince frowned quizzically. I explained, “Two more for your list: I was responding to your theory with respect to great men.”

  Sebastian shrugged. “I am always right. Perhaps it’s a pity. Sometimes I walk upon the palace wall and look down and see my subjects in the town below. I think how happy they are to be wrong in most of their opinions and judgments. How comfortable a lot, whereas I must carry the burden of perfect wisdom to my deathbed.” He rubbed his hands together: I had not previously noticed how chubby they were; so fat were his fingers as to look as though inflated. He wore no rings.

  He smiled at me and said, “But you do not yourself have a taste for boys.”

  “Yes, that is true, Your Royal Highness. I cannot explain it, but I seem to prefer women. It takes all kinds, I expect.” I made a happy-go-lucky flinch. “Would you mind telling me how you knew?”

  “You are not a great man,” cried the prince, preparing to chuckle. “And while the pederast has a keen sense of humor—he must have, given the joke he is perpetrating on nature!—he is usually the entertained and not the entertainer.” He gave vent to his risibilities, with the sound of boiling water.

  “Aha.” Until one has been put in his place by a royal personage, one has not experienced the ultimate in that exercise: the difference in rank is so commanding that to be reminded of it is not offensive. The bootblack envies his busier colleague at the next stand, not the captain of industry in whose lobby he works. But the analogy is inadequate, for it is not impossible that a shoeshine boy can become a chairman of the board, whereas blood can never become blue by gift or effort. Thus far I had seen in Prince Sebastian not the ghost of an admirable or even decent trait, yet he was the reigning prince: not so long ago in the history of humanity, such a figure was believed to have been the personal selection of God and to be able, with a touch of his hand, to cure scrofula.